Cisco’s 2011 Corporate Social Responsibility Report

Today, we released Cisco’s 2011 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. It’s our seventh and it covers our CSR efforts in the areas of governance and ethics, value chain, our people, society, and the environment.

Since the founding of our longest-running CSR program, the Cisco Networking Academy in 1997, our efforts have been authentically grown from the inside out with enthusiastic support from our employees. We believe technology is a powerful tool that can not only help our customers thrive, but bring people together to transform lives, build communities and preserve the environment.

At Cisco, we’ve seen our technology and expertise help address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. For example, we use innovative technology – like Cisco EnergyWise – to drive environmental initiatives for our customers. In addition, we worked with public and private partners to transform healthcare and education in the earthquake-stricken Sichuan Province in China through the groundbreaking work of the Connecting Sichuan initiative.

This CSR report is also a product of our technology at work. Using Cisco TelePresence, we collaborated with CSR stakeholders around the world – 25 opinion leaders in 12 countries – without a single person having to board a plane. This high-definition experience provides a rich lifelike feel to a virtual meeting, while limiting carbon emissions, increasing productivity, and enhancing the work-life balance of all those involved.

This virtual collaboration also resulted in expanded coverage of our environmental and value chain efforts, continued focus on improving our reporting against the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators, and delivery of the report as a downloadable PDF for improved search and user functionality. You’ll see that each section is supported by relevant metrics with the goal of clearly demonstrating our impact, but I encourage you to download the entire report to enable all functionalities and links between sections.

We are enormously proud of the work our people and partners do around the globe – how they engage technology and human networks to multiply the impact of their efforts. It is our hope that our reporting efforts do more than inform, but also demonstrate how we align CSR with the way we do business every day. We invite you to read and watch the compelling stories in this report and see the powerful results of these networks for yourself.

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